winter soldier

Having seen it three times in four days (yeah, you heard me), I am having a LOT of thinky thoughts about Cap 2. I may manage to discuss them at length, at some point; right now, I mostly seem to want to write fic. But I am curious about something.

How long do y'all think Bucky actually spent as the Soldier? In relative-to-him terms, I mean? Because I was thinking about it, and given what we know (mostly in cryo; two dozen known assassinations) it... might not actually have been that long? I mean, due to the vagaries of having to cast actual actors Sebastian Stan's obviously only aged a couple years, but when you work it out I actually think that's correct-- he can't have been Soldier-ing for much more than two years, maybe three at the outside.

I mean, even if we assume those two dozen are only the known missions-- even if there's twice as many-- it seemed like they couldn't keep Bucky's memories suppressed for more than a few days without wiping him. So call it a week per mission, forty or forty-five missions, add half a year or even a year for initial brainwashing and training-- you don't actually end up with that much time.

I am mostly pointing this out because I keep reading fic that frames it as SEVENTY YEARS OF UNDENDING BLOOD AND SUFFERING, when that can't possibly be the case. Plus a lot of the time there's an assumption that Bucky has no way of ever fully recovering, that he's going to be Broken Forever in some fundamental way, which-- dude, there are people in real life who spent longer periods as POWs, some in pretty horrible conditions, and went on to have healthy, happy, functional lives. One of them's a senator!

Granted, none of them were turned into brainwashed murderbots, but there is still some basis for comparison. And when you take into account that Bucky was a thoroughly decent, fairly together guy before he fell, and that he'll have Steve's unconditional support once Steve finds him, I feel like it's entirely possible for him to recover, and faster than you'd think from some of the fic I've been reading.

It's only a few years at most. In the comics, even, it's only 4-5 years, because he's twenty when he 'dies' and he's only in his mid-twenties when Steve finds him, and that was with extra time to train Red Room agents and work as a bodyguard for two years for Karpov.

Natasha says that the Winter Soldier's been operational for 50 years, while Bucky's been "dead" for 70. So I think that's two decades already when Bucky was probably freezing his ass off, doing a fat lot of nothing.